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Monday, October 22, 2007

Masters Pairs Relay Course from Heck

SUMMARY: Only one masters team of 36 ran clean.

Here's the course that Tika and her partner ran clean on--through sheer luck in some ways, really, since Tika often knocks bars (as we all know). But we also had the easier, first half of the course (white circles), which was basically a big circle with only a little RFP required between the dogwalk and the #5 jump to give them a good enough angle to it.

The second half (dark circles) seemed to be the killer. Several places on the course with threadles or near-threadles (4 to 5, 5 to 6, 7 to 8, 9 to 10, and 10 to 11, depending on your dog's stride length and how you handled them. I think that there were just a lot of bars on some of the turns; only 9 of the 36 Eed with off-courses, so it wasn't completely wiping people out.

Interestingly, all (or all but one) of the five Performance 3 teams ran clean.

(To download a larger image of this image, click and hold over the map--maybe right-click and hold--and you'll get a "save image as" menu choice.)

I was thinking about this last night and that it would be interesting to look at the scribe sheets and see whether, in fact, the first or 2nd dog tended to have more faults... but, even though I was at the score table, I wasn't really paying that much attention to that detail.

Also, just noticed who the judge was. Does he even compete in USDAA anymore?I think in order to be a USDAA judge (or judge in any organization) you should have to be currently competing with a dog. There are some judges who haven't run a dog in years. How the heck can they stay current with course design unless they experience it first hand?

Don't know. According to his blog on Eric Larsen's web site, sounds like he's competing in teacup agility (which of course is only for mini dogs). Not interested enough to go back through his blog history to see whether he's also competing in USDAA. ~~~~